Nick Hunt
I am Professor of Lighting Design and Performance Technologies, and Digital Research and Innovation Fellow at Rose Bruford College, having previously been head of the School of Design, Management and Technical Arts. My research interests include the performative nature of stage lighting, digital scenography and digital performance, the history of technical theatre, and the roles and status of the various personnel involved in theatre-making. Currently, I am exploring the relationship between scenography and photography.
I completed my PhD in 2012, entitled “Repositioning the Role of the Lighting Artist in Live Theatre Performance”. In it, I seek to use digital control technologies and a revised creative process to make lighting a more performative component of theatre performance. (Director of Studies: Professor Susan Melrose, Middlesex University.)
I am an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media. (www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpdm20#.U1g-el55ikV), and have previously convened the scenography working groups of both the IFTR and TaPRA.
I have extensive experience as a consultant and external examiner in the areas of design and technical theatre, working for universities and higher education institutions including LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, Wimbledon College of Art, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, the University of Leeds, Derby University, Edgehill University and the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts.
Phone: 020 8308 2650
I completed my PhD in 2012, entitled “Repositioning the Role of the Lighting Artist in Live Theatre Performance”. In it, I seek to use digital control technologies and a revised creative process to make lighting a more performative component of theatre performance. (Director of Studies: Professor Susan Melrose, Middlesex University.)
I am an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media. (www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpdm20#.U1g-el55ikV), and have previously convened the scenography working groups of both the IFTR and TaPRA.
I have extensive experience as a consultant and external examiner in the areas of design and technical theatre, working for universities and higher education institutions including LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, Wimbledon College of Art, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, the University of Leeds, Derby University, Edgehill University and the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts.
Phone: 020 8308 2650
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Journal Articles by Nick Hunt
In this article I describe a custom-built lighting control system, ‘Theolux’, designed to enable the operator – who I term the Lighting Artist – to respond and make an expressive contribution in the moment of performance. In particular, Theolux has a variety of interface controls that the lighting artist can choose to use, each of which offers a different expressive potential and which collectively constitute a ‘playable’ instrument. I go on to describe a performance work, Passages, made specifically to investigate my proposal that some creative decisions about the lighting should be deferred until the moment of performance, enabling the lighting artist to respond to the other performers and to the audience. I give an account of some of the affective performance qualities produced by using Theolux to control the lighting during Passages, and describe my own experience as the lighting artist using the various interface idioms during different sections of the performance. I also recount audience members’ experiences, which both confirm some of my own observations and begin to suggest the performance-making potential of my revised approach to theatre lighting.
In this article I argue that the data model used to represent the lighting within the ‘state/cue’ conception is a model based on a geometry of straight lines, grids and angles: a Euclidean and Cartesian geometry. I also argue that such a data model privileges the static over the dynamic and the synchronic over the diachronic and that this privileging has consequences for the expressive potential of light on stage. I go on to propose an alternative data model inspired by the geometry of hyperbolic planes and state-spaces, which is structured by an aesthetic logic of lighting. This ‘thread/impulse’ model is intended to promote the lighting designer’s engagement with the temporal dimension of light on stage, but also has implications for other theatre-making practices and personnel that I briefly outline.
Contents:
The philosophy and psychology of the scenographic house in multimedia theatre
Author: Steve Dixon
Modular settings and Creative Light: The legacy of Adolphe Appia in the digital age
Author: Birgit Wiens
The digital platform for costume design communication
Author: Adele Keeley
Creating new spaces: Dancing in a telematic world
Author: Pauline Brooks
Physicality: The techne of the physical in interactive digital performance
Author: Julie Wilson-Bokowiec
Resisting the lure of the screen
Author: Nick Moran
Moveable worlds/Digital scenographies
Author: Johannes Birringer
From social network to urban intervention: On the scenographies of flash mobs and urban swarms
Author: Thea Brejzek
Book Chapters by Nick Hunt
Traces is an apparatus for seeing, thinking and communicating experiences of light, which draws participants’ attention to their own situated presence in a visual encounter with the physical world. Traces prioritises experiential exploration and discovery over abstract, rationalized thought, embodying a research methodology particularly suited to the investigation of light and its often taken-for-granted role in everyday experience. Traces is also a vehicle to investigate the experience of seeing as situated, embodied and unstable. The kind of sensitivities and sensibilities an apparatus such as Traces can engender in its participants are foundational for those working creatively with light in performance, and indeed for audiences. Further, Traces proposes a methodology for future research into the experience of seeing, and the affective role of light in the performance encounter.
Creative Works by Nick Hunt
Traces borrows from perspective drawing as an act of framing (staging). It attempts to reproduce this act of viewing as determined by situatedness: the point of view in Perspective. Traces questions how we understand the world.
Nick Hunt and Hansjörg Schmidt are lighting designers, educators and researchers at Rose Bruford College, UK.
This 'making of' video documents the creation of a lighting, sound and video installation responding to the sculpture exhibition, and shows the process and ideas of the lighting, media, and sound designers. Featuring the designers Sarah EC Maines, Kathrine Sandys, Nick Hunt, Rob Kaplowitz and Jakub Daníček, who worked with an international team of students through a workshop process to create the installation.
In my investigation I proposed the role might be reformed to engage the operator with the creative realisation of the performance event. My initial research examined the changing spatial position of the operator at different periods and theorised the ‘circuit of energy’ between audience and performers. I went on to undertake a practical investigation of the impact of relocating the now creatively-active lighting operator so as to be seen by both audience and actors.
The practical investigation took place through a research-performance Passages. The Operator Connects comprises a collection of inter-related mini-essays in video, diagrammatic, photographic and text forms, offering the reader diverse ways to explore and interrogate the research process and outcomes.
The Operator Connects can be found at:
http://www.magmouse.plus.com/the_operator_connects.html
Conference Presentations by Nick Hunt
The traditional drama studio is a familiar type of space, found wherever drama training takes place, in schools, colleges, universities and drama schools. Its professional analogue is the ‘black box’ studio theatre, with which it shares several key characteristics. Both grew out of 20th century desires to move on from past traditions, seen as outmoded and fossilised. We can see the origins of these spaces in landmark historical buildings and institutions such as the 1911 Festspielhaus in Hellerau, Germany, and the London Theatre Studio on the UK founded in 1936.
Today, prompted by the dramatic changes in the industry, Rose Bruford College is responding with the creation of a new concept for a training space for performance-makers of all kinds – a Drama Studio 2.0. The College’s Digital Studio, developed over the last four years, includes facilities for motion capture, green-screen and an XR stage that can model various industry processes from virtual production for film, XR for broadcast, to mixed reality performance. Like some of its historical predecessors, Drama Studio 2.0 offers the possibility to learn and work together in a new way, and build a new kind of collaborative professional community.
Cuddington investigates the park’s multiple natures through photography, firstly as a constructed, idealised landscape in the fashion of the 18th Century landscape architects and painters. The park is both an aristocratic landscape, now democratised, and a working landscape, now made bourgeois. It is also a place of habitation, where residents enact their leisure activities, while the park’s boundary of fences, shrubs and trees ensures a carefully calibrated level of visibility, with houses overlooking the neatly constructed public park, and park-goers able to glimpse the more-or-less orderly private domestic zone in return.
My approach draws on representations of landscape in the visual arts, but also considers it scenographically, as a place of habitation – of action performed, and by implication, observed. My project is therefore also a methodological enquiry, bringing together elements of the established disciplines of art history, social history, documentary and fine art photography with the rapidly developing discipline of scenography.